The international research collective known as ESTAR(SER) concerns itself with the history of attention. In practice, that has meant much work on that elusive group of “attention artists” known variously as the Avis Tertia, the Order of the Third Bird or simply the “Birds”.
Who are the “Birds”? If you have ever seen a small gathering of persons focused with particular intensity on anything, you may have been witness to an “action” of a so-called volée of this fugitive band of attentionistas. Committed to radical acts of collective attention, the Birds pop up here and there (both now and in the past) to look and listen in poised silence. Since the early 19th century, their primary haunts have been the museums of the world, where Birdish persons have long enacted their peculiar rites.
But the exact history of these doings has never been easy to recover, in that true Birds are cagey about “Birding” (apparently their term for their distinctive way of paying attention together to works of art, or other objects): it is said that the traditional canons of secrecy around their core practice are so restrictive that any person professing knowledge of Birdish matters is immediately suspect; only a fraud would ever talk. Needless to say, this has hugely slowed scholarly progress in this important area. And it gets worse: there is a good deal of evidence that associates of the Order of the Third Bird are not merely reclusive; it seems some of them actively work to thwart their historians – purloining academic resources, doctoring archives and generally making trouble for the researchers of ESTAR(SER).
The persistence of these scholars appears finally to have paid off, however. This month, a massive new compendium of Bird scholarship finally comes into print: In Search of the Third Bird (Strange Attractor, 2021). Edited by ESTAR(SER) affiliates D. Graham Burnett, Catherine L. Hansen and Justin E.H. Smith, this handsome volume represents more than 20 years of research on the underground history of radical attention in the Birdish key.
However, already there is evidence that the Birds themselves are not pleased. It appears that a pre-press copy of the new volume fell into the hands of an active volée of the Order, who have treated it with their characteristic pluck: snide marginalia, snickering doodles, strategic strikeouts, etc. The result (posted back to ESTAR[SER] with a rude note) is a document of value in its own way – as a palimpsest of Birdish recalcitrance. Hence, we reproduce the introduction in the pages that follow, courtesy of the Milcom Memorial Reading Room, an ESTAR(SER) research centre outside New York City. ◉
